Kieran Barr

Spent the last few months building a chrome extension that monitors Amtrak fares for last-minute price drops. Shipped it. Then I shelved it. The shelving actually taught me more than the shipping.

@auren “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”- Sun Tzu Time to build

@kbarrbuilds Probably yes

three kinds of new grads get hired in 2026: the builder (shipped a thing), the operator (ran a thing), the closer (did what they said they would). every great candidate is at least one. if you are none of these, you might get hired but you are not going to be successful. that is the whole picture.

Hey Ben, would love to throw my name in the hat! Looking for a solutions engineer role. Ideally would love to be in person. Recently started building 4 months ago. Distributed my product to 37k people, 100 downloads from Reddit. Not sure if that provides any value but happy to chat more!

Turns out we're hiring for... everything! We're growing the teams that build and operate Postgres, Vitess/MySQL, and Neki. Also growing the engineering teams that surround and support the database operations: product surfaces, platform, security, and more. We're a team of "experts leading experts" that love databases, distributed systems, scalability, and reliability. Join us.

If you’ve successfully gotten Reddit api credentials in 25-26, how did you do it? The Reddit.com/prefs/apps flow just shows me policy links and silent failures. Anyone able to help?

Neurodivergent thought: The older I get the more I realize how powerful the who, what, where, when, why, how template is in a conversation.

this is exactly why you should always be interviewing the best time to find a new job is when you don't need one interviewing consistently has massive benefits > near infinite leverage > understand market rates > large increases in total comp engineers laid off from meta who are already prepared to interview can land offers in the next few weeks from other great companies

Seen a lot of these posts on LinkedIn today. Feel like 1 of 2 things goes on here(or both). 1. Talent acquisition at startups are telling former Meta people to post these kind of posts for the sake of getting high caliber candidates. 2. Employees are just posting these for the sake of a referral bonus lol

Anyone on here experienced some Shadow AI instances within their company?

This is a great product and I am happy to see this model being introduced given hiring managers and recruiters struggle to weed through their AI slop inbox. From my personal experience there are currently 2 different directions small startups building in this space are trying to go in to avoid LinkedIn/traditional resume nowadays. And that is either: 1. The outbound approach- mass application tool using an AI agent…which is terrible and often runs into ATS. I have explored this when people introduced a GitHub repo that can pump out 700 apps for you. And even a more polished version of this is a YC company that essentially commercialized that approach. For me, neither quite hit the nail on the head. It’s still a cold app at the end of the day… 2. The inbound approach- this goes in a few different directions: - From a consumer standpoint: the logic is to market yourself in public using platforms like X, Reddit, Substack, etc. doing so employers/startups naturally will gravitate towards you if they find your content of interest to their product or generally your skills if you choose to showcase/build in public. - similar, but different to this approach is doing a mix of inbound/outbound. Hence what @TalvyHQ is able to capture. Creating a curated platform via video to a recruiter/hiring manager where they actually see the candidate for who they are. - finally an AI agent/LLM startup that “does the recruiting for you” based on your resume/interests(written) and then it simply will connect you with whoever is in their internal network. Another YC is currently experimenting with this approach. The common denominator that each of these needs to show the user for me is simple: am I actually getting feedback/replies/interviews

@KjHardrict 0??

companies running 8 rounds for senior hires and 0 rounds for the juniors who would actually become those seniors is the most predictable hiring crisis of 2030's.

In present day is there more upside in joining a large brand name company in a solutions engineer role or being more of a generalist in a seed/Series A company? Which is easier to break into at the moment?

@Tancrededib Got 37k views off a shipped demo PWA, never coded before a couple months ago. Just had a good idea and front end lol.

looking to invest in people who can get into rooms the best founders i know all have one story in common, a room they weren't invited to that they got into anyway what's yours?

I do sales for a living. I don’t have a CS degree. I taught myself how to build because I haven’t learned anything new at work in a long time and it’s starting to hollow me out. Most recent ship: argusfare.com tracks Amtrak fares and alerts on price drops. It was the best month I’ve had in years. Im not asking anyone to bet on me being a senior engineer. I want to learn. l am asking for the bottom rung. Internship, apprenticeship, entry-level engineering, anywhere I would be the least experienced person in the room and learning fast. GitHub.com/kieranbarr7-ey… DMs open. Reshares appreciated.

Cornell is sending 50% of its graduates to the Bay Area. Proud of my school.

Ok I’m just going to build it. A tool that takes any LinkedIn job title(especially the absurd ones) and tells you what that person actually does day-to-day. Phase 1: a web app you can paste a title into. Phase 2: chrome extension on LinkedIn. Follow along here. Repo: GitHub.com/kieranbarr7-ey…

How do I explain to my mom that someone is making 262k a year to do “storytelling”?